Fred Brooks

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist.

Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks.jpg
Born
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

(1931-04-19)April 19, 1931
Durham, North Carolina
DiedNovember 17, 2022(2022-11-17) (aged 91)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Alma materDuke University (undergraduate)
Harvard University (postgraduate)
Known forOS/360
The Mythical Man-Month
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
Operating systems
Software engineering
InstitutionsIBM[1]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Duke University
Harvard University
ThesisThe Analytic Design of Automatic Data Processing Systems (1956)
Doctoral students
Websitewww.cs.unc.edu/~brooks

He is best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers alongside Gerrit Blaauw and Gene Amdahl and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks has received many awards, including the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999.[4]

Brooks was born in Durham, North Carolina. He studied Duke University, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, and he received a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University in 1956, supervised by Howard Aiken.

References

  1. Brooks, F. P. (1960). "The execute operations---a fourth mode of instruction sequencing". Communications of the ACM. 3 (3): 168–170. doi:10.1145/367149.367168. S2CID 37725430.
  2. "Doctoral Dissertations — Department of Computer Science". Retrieved 7 January 2014.
  3. "Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - PhD Students" (PDF). Computer Science Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved 23 October 2013.
  4. Shustek, Len (2015). "An interview with Fred Brooks". Communications of the ACM. 58 (11): 36–40. doi:10.1145/2822519. ISSN 0001-0782. S2CID 44303152.

Other websites

  Media related to Fred Brooks at Wikimedia Commons